As to e-books, and e-readings, I’m sorry, I’m too paranoid. If it’s on paper, you can’t mess with it. I’d like to be able to read the exact same story 10 years from now that I read 10 years ago. Don’t change the words due to some political correctness stuff. West Side Story: the song contains the word “gay”, I don’t care what it means today, I know what it meant back then, and don’t you dare change it because of whatever!

Perhaps I read too much Orwell when I was too young :P

I would say the problem is not in the categorisation, but those that agree to be bound by them. Check out the nonfiction sometime, for a voracious reader it’s not all dry. I really enjoyed “Why Children Fail” from the Education section, and I have Robbins’ Pathology (although that is bloody hard going for a layman like me). I feel obliged to namecheck Robin Hobb for quality fantasy and Charles Stross + Greg Egan for scifi.

What i love most of reading a lot of different stuff is that i never know where the next real gem is going to come. I’m not talking about fun books, there are a lot of those and they are nice, but the incredible ones that make you think. I love anything with a decent story if it has great characters in it, where someone puts it in a book store? i don’t care much.

The topic of pen names came up on John Scalzi’s blog the other day and one reason some writers use a pen name is to get around this bucketing. So Ringo could have chosen a pen name, like “John Starkey” for his military fiction. Of course, if it came from Baen, it might still have been shelved in SFF. One other reason to use a pen name is if you go from writing say, hard Sf space operas to feminist high fantasy, you might want a pen name so your regular readers don’t freak out.

Do mystery authors try to write in a formulaic way so their book qualifies to be labeled a ‘mystery’?

According to a friend, yes. Mysteries are as sub-bucketed as SFF, maybe more so. There is a local mystery book store here in town, and they have a sheet at the register with a bunch of categories and authors who write for the category.

I think the first time I ever realized that there were people out there that… I simply could not abide… was the first time I saw someone turn their nose up at Stephen King. “Genre literature.” It wasn’t “real literature” according to these people, at which point I decided that obviously these people were used to Other People not thinking for themselves. I find Stephen King to be a fantastic storyteller. His syntax, diction, grammar, flavor text, what-have-you… is solid. I’m not saying I’ve loved everything he’s ever written or that he is above critique… But I knew at that moment that “Those People” had no idea what a good story was about.

This extended into SciFi/Fantasy (which I have also always hated having lumped together, and yet own a couple of books that fit into both)… Which, as you said, Those People have dubbed “populist trash”. I don’t think you’re overstating that factor at all.

Finding Authors In Multiple Places: Neil Gaiman. I still couldn’t stick a firm label on the books of his that I’ve read. I guess it is all technically ‘fantasy’, but in a way, that’s a hard stretch for me to slap that single label on things like American Gods and Neverwhere.

Aside: I would love to see a “horror” section in a bookstore, but I think most of them have given up on that and put it in the “Science Fiction & Fantasy” area. I know that my local B&N has. Though I can still also find Lovecraft and sometimes Derleth in the “fiction” section.

Libraries: My school library in elementary school (up to 6th grade) had some serious conservative Baptist deep south issues. I watched the librarian throw away MANY fantasy novels. Including the entire? “Guardians of Flame” series by Joel Rosenberg. In brief, it’s kind of… the old D&D cartoon, as a series of novels. From Wikipedia: “The series is about a group of college students who participate in a fantasy role-playing game, and are magically transported to the world of the game by their gamemaster.”

These books were thrown away because they were “of the Devil”. In fact, much of our “fiction” section (they had genre stickers. SciFi/Fantasy was a sky blue sticker with a unicorn head) was treated this way. The only set of books I remember them keeping was the “Enchanted Forest Chronicles” – a set of books by Patricia C Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, etc) and I’m still shocked they kept those!

Back to the “not real literature” thing… One day I decided to try out what they are calling “real literature” these days, and picked up a collection of stories by Rick Moody. In an interview I remember reading, Rick Moody made some kind of claim about how characterization and plot “get in the way of a story”. That didn’t put him on the right stepping stone with me, and the horribly written slop that was his book sealed the deal. Metaphors that were more like riddles (or meant/invoked NOTHING), paragraph long details about things that never surfaced again in the story, nor had any importance even in the moment they were described and just… pretentious syntax meant to bedazzle the reader but really ended up befuddling them. And in the end, the reader is supposed to come to the conclusion that the writer is just Oh-so-better than they are, and that obviously, they are not “high-brow” enough to “get” what the author was trying to say. Rubbish and poppycock.

“Heinlein once wrote that he had it real bad; he’d read the used newspaper that was used to hold fish and chips if nothing else was available. ”

I am guilty of reading every shampoo bottle, every anything bottle in the bathroom while taking a bath or whatever. I am also the person who will, when conversation lags in a restaurant setting… grab the bottled and packaged condiments on the table and start reading the labels. I can’t help myself.

RAMBLING COMMENTS ARE RAMBLING.

I guess the short version is: Post good. Judgmental Labeling Bad. Bear good.

When I have to go to the big city to work, my habit is to stop into barnes and nobles after lunch before i head back to the office. I wander around the fantasy/sci-fi, go up to the teens section, (was looking for a paperback of brisinger) and then wander through the technical section. (found a nice book on wow addon lua programming but never bought it.)

I have bought a few books there, after being given “The curse of Chalion” I ended up buying “Paladin of Souls”, I bought paperback copies of “Eragon” and “Eldest.” Call me strange, but I refuse to buy a hardback of a part of a series when I already bought paperbacks of the predecessors. That’s like buying most of a series of movies on vhs and buying the rest on dvd. I have to complete my harry potter series one of these days, I have all 7, but 3 are paperback (that I bought) and 4 were hardcover gifts..

Like you, my HS library wasnt broken down into sections other than fiction/non-fiction and reference. The public library there lacked a bit to be desired tho, all three books had already been colored in…

I’ve been reading since I was crawling, or close enough as makes no difference, and I was definitely in the same boat as you. I think I was 9 or 10 years old when I picked up a copy of Dune and read my way through it, then through the next 5 books in the series. Very, very eye opening at the time – and I didn’t even understand it all. Reading Dune again a few years later, then a few years after THAT, I still picked up new things.

As to your first point about physical books, I was definitely on your side of the argument until recently. (Un)fortunately, I’ve been gifted with the ability to read books quickly. If you take your average novel (say… A Hymn Before Battle), I can probably knock that out in 3-4 hours of solid, uninterrupted reading. Maybe it takes me a little longer, but that’s roughly my pace – hours. Then plan on being in an airplane or airport for 10 hours, then having frequent downtime in the evenings for a two week business trip, then flying home… and a nook isn’t a “nice to have” item anymore, it’s a requirement. The major downside to this of course is that I now buy TWO copies of books – hardback Baen books when they come out for my bookshelves at home, plus the eBook version to read and cart around with me.